


A Man of Many Trades

by ishouldwritethatdown



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, Gap Filler, Gen, Hound Pits Pub, Mute Corvo Attano, odd jobs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:41:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21609244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishouldwritethatdown/pseuds/ishouldwritethatdown
Summary: The Hound Pits occupies a weird space in everyone's lives. Intended to be a stepping stone to better times, eventually, but they're still here in the present. And here in the present, dishes still need to be cleaned, and socks still need to be darned, and nightmares still need to be tamed.
Relationships: Corvo Attano & Cecelia, Corvo Attano & Samuel Beechworth
Comments: 9
Kudos: 67





	A Man of Many Trades

The Hound Pits was well-maintained, despite its near-empty halls and corridors. Lydia, Cecelia, and Wallace always seemed to be cleaning something and Samuel had made a few jokes at the expense of their employers, wondering how so few people could make such a sprawling mess in such a large building.

“Oh, but not you, though, Corvo,” he’d added. “No, you’re a man who only leaves your footsteps behind you if you can help it.”

After over twenty years of it, he’d eventually got used to people tidying up after him in Dunwall Tower. He’d retire to his room and find his bed made, his clothes folded, and the mirrors polished clean. He usually made an effort to make the staff’s day just a little bit easier, but still, a sense of guilt lingered whenever he found his room cleaner than he left it.

At Dunwall Tower, at least he was confident that the staff was being paid well. Money was never going to be an issue for an Imperial residence, and besides, he liked to spend his free hours with the maids and servants, and they always seemed content – borderline honoured – to work at the Tower.

The Hound Pits was different. The servants’ employers were a disgraced Admiral, a bankrupt Lord, and a banished Overseer. And he, Corvo, somewhere between an honoured guest and a hired gun, didn’t have a penny to pay them either. Lydia would say that serving the crown was its own reward, but she was a practical woman, and the moral high ground didn’t pay for anything you needed to run a bar or, indeed, a base for a Loyalist conspiracy.

Pendleton continued to insist on being treated as nobility, and although Wallace put on a show of demanding the best for his master, Corvo saw him cringe when his back was turned. He’d seen the books. He knew that their financial situation wasn’t the most secure. Mostly, he took that out on Cecelia. It made Corvo sad to see that she was used to it.

So, he made an extra effort to help the staff where he could. He cleaned up his own mess, and if Lydia had let him, he would have done his own laundry – as it was he had to settle for folding the clean sheets and clothes. He washed dishes and knives in the kitchen when he could wear down Cecelia enough to let him help, and cleared the tables while the Admiral ordered drinks from the quickly-depleting supply of alcohol.

“You don’t need to do that, Corvo,” Martin would say. “Leave it to the servants, they know what they’re doing. It’s what they’re best at.”

Corvo would shrug and carry on, and Cecelia would give him a grateful smile when he saved the leftovers from going in the bin. He’d usually take a bit of cheese and bread out to Samuel, who, like clockwork, got so immersed in working on his boat or reading his book that he “forgot” to come in and eat. Corvo didn’t blame him for avoiding their company; Samuel was a navyman, like Havelock, but they were of two different worlds.

When he entered the Hound Pits, after the other men had retired to their rooms for self-reflection and rest in preparation of Sokolov’s reception tomorrow morning, he found Cece behind the bar. A crate was balanced on her fingertips, half-on and half-off the shelf. He reached up and took the box into his hands, making her gasp at his sudden appearance.

He glanced at her with what he hoped was an open, helpful face, and she stepped back sheepishly. “It’s so silly of me, I should have got the stepladder, but there was a corner poking over the edge and I thought I could…”

Lifting the box down onto the bartop, he gave her a smile that said, ‘Happens to the best of us.’

“Thank you, Mr. Corvo,” she said, bobbing her knees slightly. Ever since Wallace had been on at her about learning to do a proper curtsey in the presence of her ‘betters’, she’d been self-consciously bobbing down at him.

He shook his head at her again, trying to tell her that she didn’t need to do that for him. The Royal Protector was invited to court, and he’d had to learn how to hold himself like an aristocrat (or, more accurately, less like a scoundrel), but he was no noble. And anyway, Wallace wasn’t getting on at Lydia or Callista for bowing instead of curtseying – probably because they weren’t afraid to stand up to him.

“Um,” she hooked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “Can I help you with anything, sir?”

Corvo shook his head. Indicating around the bar, he asked with his hands if she needed any help. The other staff weren’t kind about her intelligence, but she was quick to understand his meaning.

“Oh, no,” she said. “No, that’s quite all right, you don’t have to do that.”

He let her get over the rush to deny his help, like she was supposed to do. It was in her training, and he understood. Your employer helping you with chores was surely a sign of poor work, but since he wasn’t able to pay her, he thought a renegotiation of that standard was only fair.

“Well…” she thought after a moment, when he didn’t back down. “There’s a pair of Lord Pendleton’s stockings I’m supposed to darn. Lydia’s showed me how before, but I’m afraid to get it wrong. I don’t suppose you—” she seemed to suddenly recover her senses and exclaimed, “Oh no, forgive me, I can’t possibly ask you to do that, what was I thinking, I—”

He lifted his hands and gestured, to the best of his ability, that he was happy to help. His Serkonan sign language was wasted on most everyone at the Hound Pits, but he could get by with mostly pointing and signals. Military men had their own kind of signing, and in a pinch it could help him get his meaning across to Samuel or Havelock. He tried to avoid using it around Martin, when he could, feeling narrowed eyes and pursed lips in his expression without looking. The memories of stinging knuckles where they’d had a cane rapped across them were still clear enough, even after thirty-odd years.

It didn’t take him long to get going once she had retrieved Pendleton’s stockings. He was out of practice, but it was almost second nature to him. Cecelia observed him with great interest as she wiped down the bar, and eventually asked him where he’d learned to sew. “I never met a Guardsman who could sew before. My cousin, he once tried to sew a button back onto his uniform and ended up with more holes in his finger than those socks,” she said.

He signed “mother” automatically, it feeling like the most natural way to get his point across, before he remembered that the sign was probably not apparent to anyone who didn’t sign.

When he looked at Cece, she seemed to be trying to puzzle is out, and mimicked the gesture with her own hand before her face lit up, and she exclaimed, “Your Ma taught you!” At his obvious surprise, she explained with a smile that her aunt had moved to Serkonos after the Morley Insurrection, and her wife was Deaf. Cecelia hadn’t seen them in years, but she’d been intrigued by the language of hands, and asked her aunt if she could teach it to her. She’d learned a few signs, in the short time they had together.

“Like…” she made a shape with her hand, middle fingers down and the other two up with the thumb.

Corvo broke into a grin as she realised what she’d just said, however unintentionally, and made the returning sign while she buried her face in her hands. _“I love you too.”_

Letting her recover from the full blush that had turned her skin almost as red as her hair, he went on sewing. He tried, whenever he could, to foster a swell of pride in himself for his heritage. After all, it was currently repairing Lord Pendleton’s clothes and sparing Cecelia from one of Lydia’s lectures.

He’d stopped telling people about his parents very quickly after he joined the Grand Guard in Karnaca. When news of his mother’s death reached him in Dunwall, Jessamine had picked up his sorrow quickly and, a well-intentioned teenager who had never known anything but nobility, had told him that she would help him organise her funeral parade. She was imagining a wake as grand as Beatrix’s had been – it was sweet, that she thought every mother should receive the same honour as the late Queen of Gristol.

He didn’t have the heart to tell her that Paloma Attano had died alone in her crumbling apartment building weeks after he’d left Karnaca. He couldn’t tell her that her death had been reported by two thieves breaking in, and not by the neighbours who had complained of the stench to the landlord some time earlier. He couldn’t tell her that she had then been lowered into in an unmarked grave without ceremony, and his childhood home had been boarded up not long after for infrastructure issues. He’d never have found out at all if Duke Theodanis hadn’t caught wind by pure chance and taken the time to write him a letter.

His mother used to say that no matter where you went, folks would always need clothes fixing. Needing to impart her wisdom all of a sudden, he made the sign for “mother” again, and made a circular motion with his finger at the map of the Empire that hung on the wall behind the bar, and finally indicated the stocking, which was coming along nicely even if he did say so himself.

He and his sister had hated learning how to stitch. They’d rather be running around in the streets, or climbing trees. But she was right, it had served him well, even if he didn’t make his living off it. He remembered Emily splitting the knee of her tights during one of their climbing lessons, and how he had sat in the shadow of one of the rock alcoves around the Tower grounds and sewed it back up before she got in trouble from her governess.

And despite their scorn, his fellow Guards in Karanca hadn’t minded that he knew one of the peasant trades when it was useful to them. He’d managed to scrape together some extra coin by charging for the repair of their uniforms or the adjustment of their waistbands.

“I reckon she was right about that,” Cecelia agreed, as she watched his stitches carefully, and he smiled.

Later on, he sighed and found that it wasn’t quite cold enough outside to turn his breath to mist.

Feeling the cool air on his face wasn’t quite enough tonight. He’d leaned against the windowsill outside his room for some time, looking at the way the moonlight shone off the corrugated iron bridge that led to Emily’s tower. The lights were off, and he didn’t want to frighten either Emily or her caretaker by entering while they were sleeping.

But he couldn’t banish the thought from his mind; that now that he had Emily back safe, she would be taken away from him again at the earliest opportunity.

Not wanting to use the stairs and risk running into any of the others, he hopped out of the window and climbed down the side of the building using the vents and ledges that he was already familiar with. He could hear Piero working in his workshop. Sometimes he could hear the whine of the buzzsaw from his bed, but so far he had been much too exhausted for it to hinder his sleep.

He warmed his hands in his pockets and wandered down to the waterfront. It was still tonight – so different from back in Karnaca, where the waves constantly crashed and warm winds blew in over the sea. The only times the sea ever lay flat on the coast of Serkonos was right before a storm was going to tear through the southern Isles.

“Good evenin’ to ya, Corvo,” Samuel greeted, surprising him out of his drifting thoughts. Noticing this, he apologised, “Sorry about that, sir. Didn’t mean to startle ya.”

He was sitting in his boat, with his feet propped up on the dashboard. He was puffing out smoke from a cigar, and offered Corvo a smoke. He declined, but sat down on the edge of the boat with his feet on the deck. He glanced up at the tower, looming in the darkness, motionless as it had been from his floor.

“Must be hard trusting anybody to keep the little one—ah, the young Lady, safe,” Samuel said, successfully reading his face. “Losin’ sleep o’er it isn’t going to do her any good, though.”

He sighed and nodded. He knew he was right. The day Emily was taken, it had been Jessamine that noticed the guards missing, not him. It had been Emily that saw Daud’s assassins crossing the roof, not him. He had been weary from travelling, he had been sloppy, and it had cost him almost everything. He needed to sleep.

“Tell you what,” the boatman said suddenly, lifting his feet from the dashboard. “It’s nippy out here tonight. Let’s warm ourselves up an ale or two, help put our minds to rest.”

He was sceptical, but Samuel seemed insistent, so he followed. Most of the lights were out in the bar, except for a lamp in the corner that Cecelia was working by. When she saw them, she seemed surprised that she wasn’t the only one still awake. Samuel invited her to join them.

At first it seemed like she was going to refuse, but something changed her mind, and she smiled before asking for Samuel to pour her one, too.

Warm drinks in hands, they went back outside and sat on the wall. Corvo noticed that Samuel’s eyes went towards the sea and the horizon, while Cece’s went upwards to the sky. The stars were out in numbers tonight, and since this part of the city was in almost total darkness, they were clearer than he’d seen in a while.

“If you could go anywhere in the world,” Samuel posed. “Where d’you think? Me, I’ve always wanted to travel to Pandyssia, see some of it myself. Might just drive myself mad in the process… That’s if I’m not already bonkers.” He nudged Cece with a chuckle, and she returned his smile.

“I’d like to go to Morley. My mother was from there, and I’ve always thought that seeing where I’ve come from might tell me… what I’m supposed to do.”

With the Heart quivering in his hand, he’d learned that Cecelia had once aspired to own a place like this. That aspiration had faded as she progressed into adolescence, and never grown back. With supervisors like Lydia and Wallace, that was hardly surprising. They were fond of saying that Cecelia was suited to the “simple work”.

“What about you, Corvo?” Samuel prompted. “Anywhere back in Serkonos you miss?”

Serkonos wasn’t the biggest island in the Isles, but he hadn’t seen much of it. He’d been born in Karnaca and not left until he was eighteen, when the Duke shipped him off to Dunwall. Since his mother died shortly after, he’d never been back to the Batista District where he grew up, but without his mother or his sister, the city might as well have been a stranger to him. He’d passed through the rest of Serkonos on well-worn tracks, but never stopped long enough for there to be anywhere he missed – he had had a new and exciting life in Dunwall waiting for him. Why dally?

As for Morley and Tyvia, he’d stopped in the capitols when he was touring the Isles six months ago. That had been on grave business, asking for help with the rat plague on behalf of the Empress. That seemed like decades ago, now, but he wasn’t eager to take another trip.

He shook his head in answer to Samuel’s question. With a smile, he pointed at Emily’s tower, where he hoped she was sleeping soundly, now. Callista had neglected to comment when he stroked her hair until the fidgeting and murmuring calmed, and for that he was grateful. Waking up in the Hound Pits had been disorienting so far, leagues comfier than Coldridge but not nearly as familiar as Dunwall Tower. He had longed for his bed there many-a-night since his imprisonment. But as he had sat by Emily’s side, protecting her from her nightmares and all the things that go bump in the night, he had never been more sure that he was right where he needed to be.


End file.
